I thought I’d take a look at software-defined networking (SDN) this month, since it’s another topic I regularly see across Technically Speaking and a subject that’s been populating most technology news headlines recently. Like my previous article covering network functions virtualization (NFV) which was published last year, I wanted to not only understand the subject matter better myself, but share with you the fundamentals of the concept as well as its supposition ...

It seems like all we hear about these days is “the cloud”; music in the cloud, photos in the cloud, video in the cloud, backup in the cloud. But what does all of the cloudification mean for traditional service providers and their traditional suppliers? ...

For this post, I met up with Christoph Glingener of ADVA Optical Networking to find out which innovations he believes are having the biggest impact, what he thinks are the barriers standing in the way of progress and what surprises him most about the networking industry ...

If there's one thing that can be said about the emerging distributed data environment, it's that it will be chaotic. At the moment, most long-haul connections between data centers and remote sites are built for largely predictable workloads: a daily data dump or at least semi-regular file transfers of reasonable size. As the enterprise gravitates toward multi-cloud infrastructure, however, the wide area network will take on more of the characteristics of the local area network: rapid, dynamic interchanges of data and applications that can wreak havoc on capacity planning, bandwidth management and other functions. Part of the solution to this problem is the data center interconnect (DCI), which provides broadband connectivity over great distances, usually on optical transport. But simply building a wider pipe is not enough. In order to gain optimal efficiency, the DCI will also have to scale dynamically to suit this constantly shifting mix of traffic ...